Next for Nintendo

You might say that the Nintendo Switch is the epitome of everything the company has worked towards since entering the company entered the video games business in the latter half of the twentieth century. For the last thirty years, Nintendo has been the company of two consoles — the first being the home console, the second, their handheld consoles. With the Switch and the Switch Lite being their new kids on the block, both boxes are still ticked, except when you boil it down to parts they are the same console massively cutting down on production costs.

So where does the company go from here? Disregarding the ability to now develop and produce the same game for two different consoles, what does the company actually do now they have crested that impossible mountain by combining their two divisions into one?

For a while, Nintendo will continue to produce games and develop new concepts to be used with the Switch, and we may even get the Switch 2 or Switch Pro at some point in the future, but there is a definitely a need for a hardware revision in the company’s future. Except it’s more than likely that the format Nintendo has entered into, the truly portable home console, will be one they stay with for quite some time.

Nintendo undoubtedly has one of the most popular intellectual property catalogues in multimedia. Ignore the video games industry, Nintendo’s characters are as popular as Disney’s, and when you put them into any different media format then you will see money to be made. Does that mean Nintendo will put out movies and other tie-ins? Probably. Does this mean Nintendo will licence their characters for other consoles — highly improbable.

Despite Nintendo releasing games on mobile devices, their one undying rule is that these games are designed to feed players into the world of Nintendo hardware for more in-depth gaming on their systems using their characters. Nintendo is one of the oldest players in town, and they’re never going to be foolish enough to let their one main selling point loose by releasing their games onto other systems. Not only will it feel like a blasphemy playing a Nintendo title on a non-Nintendo system, the short-term gain would mean a long-term pain. Their experiments before, particularly games like the